[DEFCON28]

Not to detract one bit from the evil horror of Americans who purchased him and brought him to the US but what of the neighboring tribe who captured and sold him? (As is described in this article, and was news to me.) That’s a story I’ve never heard told.

[JorgeGT]

Is this not taught in school in the US? My country (Spain) profited by the slave trade as well, and the general process of how slaves were brought to our colonies was taught. The man of the article was from (or close?) Dahomey, whose Kings became fabulously rich by selling slaves to the westerners [1]:

King Tegbesu made £250,000 a year selling people into slavery in 1750. King Gezo said in the 1840's he would do anything the British wanted him to do apart from giving up slave trade:

"The slave trade is the ruling principle of my people. It is the source and the glory of their wealth…the mother lulls the child to sleep with notes of triumph over an enemy reduced to slavery…"

Other African Kings were making bank as well. After the British made slave trade illegal in 1807, a distraught King of Bonny complained [1]:

"We think this trade must go on. That is the verdict of our oracle and the priests. They say that your country, however great, can never stop a trade ordained by God himself."

---

[1] http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/africa/features/storyofafr...

[telltruth]

You have to also understand that many neighbors hate each other far far more than a distant enemies regardless of evilness scale. Iran vs Saudi Arabia, China vs Japan, S Korea vs N Korea, India vs Pakistan, Scotland vs England, Alabama vs New York :). Many people in these groups will happily sale people on other side as slave to green aliens in exchange for wealth and dominance.

After you understand this, its not hard to imagine that white slave traders would naturally leverage African tribes at constant wars with each other to capture other party's members for money. What's better than killing your enemy? Make them disappear permanently while becoming rich and powerful!

I also doubt if African tribes actually understood this as part of war against their own race. The white salve traders would have surely treated their helpers very nicely and respectfully while introducing themselves as service providers to take their enemies away in exchange of money. People in Africa would at that time have little means to know what these white slave owners in Western world really thought about them and how they treated them because of their skin color.

So the slave traders systematically exploited same trick that colonials used to dominate vast populations with extremely small number of their own people: identify factions, take sides, wait till one faction gets weakened in economic and military strength from wars, load them up with debts and fear, and finally submit them to obedience. The classic divide and conquer strategy works every time through out the history in all kind of different problems.

[aaron-lebo]

They may have been ignorant of the extent of slavery, but I'd be surprised if they weren't aware on some level of what was going on.

There were fairly notorious slave trading outposts up and down the African coast. Eg.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cape_Coast_Castle

David Livingstone came across Arab slave traders in the 1870s deep in the interior:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Livingstone#Livingstone_...

We often talk about slavery in the West, but many don't realize how endemic slavery was to the Arab world and how late it lasted:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab_slave_trade

Slavery in the Ottoman Empire was abolished in 1924 when the new Turkish Constitution disbanded the Imperial Harem and made the last concubines and eunuchs free citizens of the newly proclaimed republic.[17] Slavery in Iran was abolished in 1929. Among the last states to abolish slavery were Saudi Arabia and Yemen, which abolished slavery in 1962 under pressure from Britain; Oman in 1970, and Mauritania in 1905, 1981, and again in August 2007.[18]

Finally, the reach of slavery is pretty incredible. During the Great Game period between Russia and Britain in Central Asia, both sides would come across Russian slaves who had been taken by Turkic raiders. This was at least 1840 or so.

But again, to circle back around to the point, nobody was really unaware of this stuff going on. Slavery unfortunately has been a pretty common feature of history. We all played divide and conquer. The West weren't the only people smart enough to figure out that strategy.

It takes some agency from those peoples when we see them as unknowing, ignorant victims who were tricked by outsiders. They in reality made brutal and tactical decisions about their local enemies. They weren't dumb, they knew what they were doing.

[telltruth]

I don't have proof but I think around 15th and 16th centuries, slavery wasn't considered as abhorrent crime by most of the populations. It was just the way of life and no one blinked twice when looking at slave children laboring away their lives. For example, if you failed to pay your debt in many culturally sophisticated places, you get to become slave for rest of your life and it was considered perfectly acceptable that slavery gets inherited by your offspring. There were even laws that slaves can buy off their freedom if they somehow save enough over time to pay off the debt. During Roman times, it was expected that winners in the war will take surviving looser in their wars as slaves, including their family. The Roman laws maintained elaborate registration system for slaves and there were stiff penalties for slaves running off. Salves were huge part of economy (and most of them perhaps weren't Africans). There were few powerful at the top needed massive cheap labor to maintain their large estates and build elaborate structures that are mind boggling to even today's generations. Somewhere along the history, freedom and compassion for the common man suddenly became important and the concept of slavery become repulsive. So it would be wrong to look at people in that time with how we feel about slavery now. I highly doubt the African tribes and even white traders looked at slavery the way we look at it now.

[DEFCON28]

I think many people in the West don’t realize the Arab and Moslim contribution to the slave trade. Especially considering the sympathy these groups receive from Progressive political groups in the United States.

[paganel]

The article touches on that:

> There was concern among “black intellectuals and political leaders” that the book laid uncomfortably bare Africans’ involvement in the slave trade, according to novelist Alice Walker’s foreword to the book, which is finally being published in May. (...) As Walker writes, “Who would want to know, via a blow-by-blow account, how African chiefs deliberately set out to capture Africans from neighboring tribes, to provoke wars of conquest in order to capture for the slave trade. This is, make no mistake, a harrowing read.”

I agree, though, if we want to be more closer to the truth in terms of what really happened back then we need to also focus on how the African slaves really got to become slaves in the first place (most probably as a result of war or rapines).

[DEFCON28]

Yes. And I fully agree that without the demand there would not have been the supply. I’m not trying to start a “butwhatabout” here.

[DEFCON28]

> members of the neighboring Dahomian tribe captured him and took him to the coast. There, he and about 120 others were sold into slavery and crammed onto the Clotilda, the last slave ship to reach the continental United States.

Even repeating a sentence about this that appeared in the original article gets downvoted and reported. Why is this such a sensitive thing to talk about?

[crispyporkbites]

Because it goes against the narrative that white people have and continue to oppress black people. The reality is much more complex than that.